Syrian hacktivists hijack BBC Weather feed

Syrian hacktivists took over the BBC Weather Twitter account on Thursday afternoon.

Instead of getting the usual updates such as "partly cloudy over the British Isles with a chance of rain later" the 60,000 followers of the @BBCWeather account on Twitter were confronted with a series of bizarre messages. These updates included:

"Whether the legitimate owners of the @BBCWeather account were phished, had their password cracked, or made the mistake of using the same password in multiple places isn't currently clear - but what is obvious is that right now they have no control over their account," writes Graham Cluley of Sophos in a blog post.

The hack appears to have been motivated by a desire to push out propaganda to a wider audience rather than any intention to spread malicious links, or to promote diet scams, two popular reasons for Twitter account hijacks, which are becoming increasingly frequent.